‘Extraction arrest’ is a colloquial term for pretrial detention that is repeatedly extended in order to get the arrested person to confess to charges or incriminate others. Polish criminal procedure completely excludes the possibility of such arrest, which is basically an investigative method. Nevertheless, law enforcement authorities, with the approval of the courts, often use pretrial detention precisely to force the suspect to adopt a certain attitude, primarily related to cooperation with law enforcement. This violates the prohibition against forcing a suspect to self-incriminate.
Practical problems and solutions
‘Extraction arrest’ is directly related to the problem of abuse of pretrial detention in the Polish legal system, which, despite the fact that it should be treated as an exceptional preventive measure, is used universally, constituting in practice the most commonly used preventive measure. Undoubtedly, this is a serious problem of the Polish legal system, which, despite the appeals of numerous organizations, as well as the European Court of Human Rights, remains to this day, for completely incomprehensible reasons, unresolved by the legislator.
The legal community still hopes that the legislator will take action in order to change this wrongful practice. For a start, it would be sufficient to clarify the prerequisites for the use of pre-trial detention in the Criminal Procedure Code. However, the biggest challenge for the legislator would be to convince law enforcement agencies to change their practice. The idea would be to encourage them to use non-custodial preventive measures (p.e. police supervision) more frequently. The most important thing, however, would be an absolute ban on the use of pre-trial detention as an investigative method. However, these changes would certainly be extremely difficult to implement. This is because it would require a reorganisation of the entire system of law enforcement agencies, especially prosecutors’ offices.
Full article is available in Polish here.
